Sam Harrelson

WebПарк.ру: Сенсация! Водоплавающие тигры (33 фото)

Sweet mother of wow…

The Smashing Pumpkins have announced two sets of residency gigs: nine shows at the Orange Peel in Asheville, N.C., (June 23, 24, 26, 27, 29, 30 and July 2, 3, and 5) plus eight shows at the Fillmore in San Francisco (July 22, 24, 25, 27, 28, 30 and 31 and August 1).

The band will vary set lists from night to night, performing songs from the upcoming album Zeitgeist, Pumpkins classics, plus unreleased material and tunes written the day of the show.

The concerts are designed to give fans a glimpse into the Pumpkins’ creative process.

Tickets go on sale this Sunday (May 20). If anyone wants to come up for a show ($20), you’re more than welcome to crash at the casa de harrelson here in Asheville!

Pollstar — The Concert Hotwire

YouTube, MySpace and PhotoBucket Blocked from Military Computers

YouTube, MySpace and PhotoBucket Blocked from Military Computers at Digital Inspiration

I read way too many feeds in a given day.  I need to narrow it down, but it’s a tough chore because I have so many varied interests.

Letting them pile up over the weekend resulted in over 2k new entries that I had to plow through rather quickly without much concentration.

Hmm… I need to outsource my feed reading…

The book on Assyriology and 19th Century American reception I wrote while at Yale has been up on Amazon.com for a while (you can also order it from the Yale Art Gallery site).

However, I was checking up on how it was doing at Amazon and there’s a re-seller who’s listing it for close to $30.  Wow!

If you need a copy, I’ve got a couple left and I’ll gladly send your way.  I would make it an eBook and post it here, but Yale Art Gallery owns the right and it probably would not be kosher to post it up without violating all sorts of copyrights.

I’ll know better next time I publish and make sure to have the ability to post it up here.

Dad, my best friend and uber-lawyer Jon Williams and I went to the Darlington Raceway this weekend for the Busch Race and NASCAR Nextel Cup races.

Sadly, the Nextel Cup race was called last night around 8:30 and rescheduled for this afternoon.  So, I had to head back to Asheville today and missed the race.  However, we had a great time at the Busch race on Friday night. We cooked out before the race and hung around my campsite for a while afterwards.  I camped out at the track on Friday night and was literally carried away by fire ants.  I’m itchy now.

Here are some shots of the Busch race from Jon’s Flickr stream…

The Nextel Cup race went well today for my driver, Ryan Newman.  He finished 4th, so I was pretty excited and hated missing the race.

It’s sad that Darlington only has one race a year since the races there are always so much better than the cookie-cutter tracks that predominate the circuit these days.

Thanks, Jon and Dad!

PROM.jpg on Flickr – Photo Sharing!

Happy Mother’s Day to Mom, Donnie and Anna.

Schaefer, Macy, Sylvia, Baby and I love all of you.

It’s interesting that since I’ve hooked my mom up to GMail, we’re in a lot more communication these days via the GTalk instant messaging client within GMail.  I keep GTalk running under my Jabber account within Pidgin, so it’s kinda like an always on mom. 

Thanks, interwebs.

Earnhardt to leave DEI after ’07, unsure of future

NASCAR.COM – Earnhardt to leave DEI after ’07, unsure of future – May 10, 2007

CostPerNews jumped the big 300 mark this morning (finally!).

I wish I felt like blogging there more.

I want to move everything here, but that would be a huge pain in the ass.  Hmm… what to do, what to do.

Wow.

What a crazy semester of teaching, blogging, managing programs, consulting, fixing up a house and becoming a soon-to-be dad.

Anyway, one of those is now struck from the list as the semster is over for my Religious Studies 101 class.  All the grades are turned in, all the emails are answered and all the papers are read.  It’s amazing how quickly some things end, especially when you think you have so much invested in them.

Anti-climactic.

You can relive our semester at www.harrelsonreligion.com.  We had a good time, and went out Beatles style with a half played note at the end of Her Majesty.

It has long been assumed that Herod was buried at Herodium, but decades of excavations failed to turn up the site until now. The first century historian Josephus Flavius described the tomb and Herod’s funeral procession.

King Herod ‘s tomb found, archaeologist says – CNN.com

The following short quiz consists of 4 questions and will tell you whether you are qualified to be a professional. The questions are NOT that difficult.

1. How do you put a giraffe into a refrigerator?…

A Giraffe, an Elephant, and a Refrigerator (by Jeremy Zawodny)

I was reminded of this post in the feed reader today…

http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/008547.html

Basically, Zawodny says widgets are bad because they are hard to skin, they might slow your site down, they don’t pass on value to search engines, they don’t work everywhere and they are not secure.

Hogwash.  You could say that about any online platform.  Widgets break down the html static pages and even blogs to a point where it threatens our own conceptions of ease.

Just look at what the MySpace generation has done with widgets and CSS.  Sure, there are some ugly MySpace pages, but that’s the future.

Did I screw something up on CostPerNews?

I changed the theme but haven’t played with the wp-config.php file or localhost.

Any ideas?

EDIT: Nevermind… everything seems normal now.  Except the new CostPerNews design crashes IE7.  Sweet.

My favorite TV show, Lost, is ending in 2010.

That’s three more seasons.

As if that’s not sad enough (well, everything good has a definite ending… see Ze Frank’s The Show), but the final three seasons will be 16 episode seasons which will run from February to May.  That means no fall Lost shows from here on out.

I hope it sustains the audience because it’s only getting better.

From Miguel Guhlin’s Around the Corner blog (one of my favorites on education and forward thinking)…

“K-12 education, as it’s structured now, prevents the use of Read/Write Web tools like wikis, blogs, and podcasts…and the ability of people to publish at will. Consider how many organizations allow their members to podcast presentations…that any organization might try to STOP people or control individuals publishing shows how quickly the paradigm has changed.”

We’ve got to get over this hump in education. Education should be cutting edge and not afraid of new technologies.  The fact that we try to restrict kids from interacting with social technologies or platforms such as Wikipedia because of teacher and administration ignorance is shameful.

I wonder what it will take to get us over this hump?

I’ve gone back and forth on how I think and feel about things like Google Reader and GMail.

At times, I’ve been the loudest and most vocal advocate for web based apps and the mobile lifestyle it enables.  However, as of late I’ve switched back to using Liferea (Linux feed reader) as my feed reader and Thunderbird as my email client.  I’ve slowly been trying to get people to email me at my samharrelson.com address (me at samharrelson.com) rather than my GMail address and all of my feed subscriptions are now on Liferea.

Similarly, I’ve stopped using the chat program Meebo as much as I have in the past in favor of GAIM and the new Pidgin (Gaim2.0).

I wonder how many other techy people plunged into the web only lifestyle and have since pulled back into non-web apps?

Heck, I’m even writing this using Drivel, which is an offline blog composer in Linux.

Just got through watching George Tenet on this week’s Meet the Press.

It’s amazing how everyone is trying to cover their behinds now that we realize what we’ve gotten ourselves into.  And, it’s sad.

MSNBC has a unique “sliding scale” to rate how the Democrat Presidential candidates performed this evening…

Head over to MSNBC and try it out based on how you thought the Democrat candidates did at tonight’s debate in Orangeburg, SC.

Just got through watching and digesting the first Democrat debate in Orangeburg, SC at SC State University.

Barack was on his A Game, Hillary seemed flustered and Edwards was great until the very last question.

When asked “Who Is Your Moral Leader?,” Edwards paused for an awkward ten seconds before stumbling out something about his personal lord.

Come on, John.  I’m a huge fan.  I supported you in ’04 and I’m supporting you in ’08, but that was embarrasing.  Why not something like…

“Well, there are many.  My dad was my first moral example who showed me that money isn’t everything but character is. Then, when I had the opportunity to go to college because of my dad’s hard work, I came into contact with the works of Gandhi and MLK, Jr who opened my eyes to the importance of morality in politics and public service.”

That would have won you the presidency… no contest.

We’re behind you and Elizabeth, John… now get on your A-Game and be the candidate that we know you can be.

(Photo from Freder1k on Flickr)

Andrew Wee has tagged me on the latest meme sweeping the interwebs…

Write a post on your best productivity tips. Challenge yourself by picking your single best productivity tip (although this isn’t a requirement; you can give us more if you want!)

Wow.  I am probably the most disorganized person in the world, yet find some way to manage all that I have on my plate.  Distilling my crazy practice of aggregating note taking, Blackberry checking, feed reading, project work and communications into a few tips is nearly impossible.

Running a full time blog, teaching two college courses, working on finishing my PhD in ancient near eastern history, being a husband (soon to be father), putting together PlanetBeta and actively managing four affiliate programs is downright crazy and not to be attempted.  However, I manage to do it all and still have time to sort through the 700 plus feeds I subscribe to everyday, watch my beloved Chicago Cubs on MLB.tv and have an active social life… and a clean inbox.

The secret is to play more.

My Productivity Tip: Only “work” 30 minutes out of every hour.  “Play” the other 30 minutes.  No matter what.

I have a countdown clock that I keep on my desktop that is set to 30 minute intervals.  Whatever I’m doing, at the end of those 30 minutes, I stop, stand up, breathe deep, make paper airplanes, play with my dogs, take a walk, browse YouTube, call my mom, eat, check in on the Cubs, attempt to hack up my blogs and Ubuntu boxes, go play basketball, or something “fun.”  Then, 30 minutes later I’m back to “work.”

This is not for everyone.  You certainly can’t do this in an office setting (unless you work for Dunder Mifflin).  However, I “work” from home and love what I do and I have worked myself into a situation where I have complete flexibility of how I want to live my life.

However, if you know me, you know that I only sleep about 4 or 5 hours a night and am usually in possession of a laptop within a wifi hotspot during my waking hours.  So, in those 20 or so hours that I’m awake, I easily get a “full day’s” work done and then some.  Working in an office 9-5 is not for me and not for most humans.  It’s unnatural!  It’s not worth it…quit your “job.”

Oddly enough, I get more “work” done than anyone I know (including my physician wife).  I’m certainly not to this level of productivity, delegation, automation and efficiency yet, but I’m working my way there!

So, there you have it… embrace your natural animal curiosities and don’t chain yourself to some desk with some plastic chair.  Life is short and time is long!

So now I have to tag five others.

Hmm… I tag:

Scott Jangro

Jeff Molander

Jeff Doak

Shawn Collins (guessing it will involve Diet Dr Pepper and a picture of Ronald Reagan)

Jonathan (Trust)

Stephanie Agresta 

Yep, it’s true.

I’ve gotten my mom on GMail.  I think it will change her life and improve our communication as she is already taking advantage of GTalk within GMail.

Congrats, mom!

Via Gia Trapani’s Scribbling.net